I can’t decide if i’m simply being narrow-minded and not creative enough, or being realistic.
On the real, the majority of Traktors effects are useless, and even more useless on the fly.
Is this the general consensus?
I use stuff like Delay or Gater when I have it planned out to some extent, even Transpose stretch on vocal samples. I can use filter without planning, Ice Verb is pretty easy to use with out planning. Beatmasher you can use on the fly I guess, but it gets pretty tiresome.
The rest? I deem useless. Flanger? Really? Does that EVER sound good? Even using Reverb on the fly is risky because of how heavy handed it sounds unless you have it tweaked and worked out to begin with.
Any tips on incorporating more effects? I think they’re fun, and gives me something to do. But I can’t decide if I’m just wasting my time and if they’re simply taking away from the mix.
I agree. In my opinion all Traktor’s Effects have a very quick action radius. They go from nothing to WTF IS HAPPENING very quickly. Reverb is a great example. First there’s nothing and when you turn it up slightly, there is bass flying around everywhere. Quite unhealthy. Filters have the exact same problem. When in the middle, they’re silent but when you even look at them wrong, they cut out half the sound spectrum.
+1 on chaining, i think it makes a big difference what you have to fire them off with. i’m a midifighter fan boy for the instant grat mapping, makes it easy to use lots of effects effectively.
One of the best things I ever did was read the FX section of the manual. Gives you a much better understanding of how all the effects work. Also you’ll soon realize you get waaay more control over FX in single FX mode. So far I find that DJTT has the right idea, find some great FX values/parameters that work, map those to a single button that will instantly load and turn on those fx.
I think its a matter of taking the time to experiment with chaining and also control. Even at its simplest, every effect still has a wet/dry control and an effects range. Its knowing when and how to manipulate that to enhance your mix. Sure, if you just hit an effect in the middle of a track for no apparent reason, it can sound out of place, not add anything to your mix, and just sound like you are putting in an effect just for the sake of it. When used with other effects, or for a build, or a drop, or a transition, or with a loop, effects can be a very powerful tool. Traktor Pro is a professional DJ software that give you the tools, its up to you to learn them inside and out and get creative to get the most of out of those tools.
Also check out some videos by “army of me” on youtube, this young lady has a really tight grasp on things efx wise and i have learned a shit ton from her in these regards. highly recommended
Well honestly, you’re right, most of the effects don’t sound very good, and the ones that do are heavily contextual, but that doesn’t stop the average “controllerist” from laying on them and religiously adhering to Traktor for them. But shhhh, we don’t talk about that here.
I actually found that advanced mode works a bit better than chaining - you get a bit more control over the effect since you have more parameters to mess around with. That said, I look at Traktor’s effects as good to have on the off-chance that whatever mixer I’m using doesn’t have effects, but not as something I’d use primarily. I find the effects on my DJM 900 to be much more transparent (they don’t kick you in the face when you turn them on) and the dry/wet functionality seems to work much more as I’d expect it to; Traktor’s dry/wet seems to often significantly reduce the volume of your track without a whole lot you can do about it. And before people jump down my throat about it - I don’t think the DJM effects are great, just that they’re better than Traktor’s in my experience. It’s the same with filters and EQing; Traktor’s internal mixer does the job, it just doesn’t sound great doing it.
As for flanger - yes, the vast majority of the time it just sounds like garbage. However, if you use it creatively (say only use the decreasing pitch part) or with the right tracks (staccato-type percussion like you find in tech house can work - busy tracks like electro house it’ll tend to sound bad/cluttered) then it can sound reasonable. The reverb thing is very much a Traktor issue. I find the reverb on my DJM quite usable while I barely ever used the reverb in Traktor. Traktor’s effects seem to have very small “sweet spots” where they’ll sound decent which makes live experimentation with them a tricky business. The armyofme videos mentioned somewhat solve this issue by setting up values prior to performance to ones that sound decent so you can actually use the full rotation of the effects knob without mucking up your mix, and they can produce some cool sounds. Still, the lack of adjustability using either this method or manual adjustment of effects often leads at least my effects usage in mixes to sound a bit boring and repetitive. It’s “oh, there goes that effect again” instead of a subtle, constructive addition to the mix.
Some people will tell you, “a reverb’s a reverb,” and to a certain extent they’re right. The general construction of the effect will be the same from one effects processor to another and they’ll all sound similar. However, the subtle differences between effects can easily change the effect from usable to useful.
All of that being said - it’s nice that Traktor’s effects are synced to the beatgrid, especially with the gater/trans which is pretty much the only Traktor effect I use at this point. For everything else I use the DJM. Still, maybe I just have no idea what I’m doing - I’d love for someone to prove me wrong.
